Radicalization: Why Some People Choose the Path of Violence

The New Press gratefully acknowledges the Florence Gould Foundation for supporting the publication of this book.

© 2015 by Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme

Translation © 2017 by The New Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce se lections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Originally published in France as Radicalisation in 2015 by Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

ISBN 978-1-62097-269-4 (e-book)

CIP data is available

The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the in dependent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com

Composition by Westchester Book Composition

This book was set in Electra

Printed in the United States of America

24681097531

Contents

Introduction: The Notion of Radicalization

1. The History of Radicalization

2. Islamist Radicalization in the Muslim World

3. The Jihadist Intelligentsia and Its Globalization

4. The Web

5. Financing Radicalization

6. Sites of Radicalization

7. The Ambiguous Role of Frustration in Radicalization

8. The European Model of Radicalization

9. The New Radicalism on the March

10. Radicalization Versus Deradicalization

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Notion of Radicalization

Before the attacks of September 11, 2001, radicalization was a marginal notion, both in the social sciences and in works attempting to make sense of political, religious, or social extremism. In the West, the literature devoted to terrorist movements¹ since the early nineteenth century was more intent on discussing their forms of action—acts of terrorism for some, resistance against the oppressor, the occupier, or the enemy for others—than on studying the processes leading up to the recourse to violence. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has attempted to promote research on terrorism and the factors that might encourage it, and radicalization has become a key notion for explaining the genesis of groups that embrace violent action.

The term radicalization refers to the process by which an individual or group adopts a violent form of action directly linked to an extremist ideology with a political, social, or religious content that contests the established order at a political, social, or cultural level (Borum 2011; Wilner and Dubouloz 2010). The elaboration of the practical implications of that notion is, in current practice, undeniably linked to national security concerns and seeks to answer such questions as: How can we protect cities, individuals, and countries (especially those in the West but also, by extension, others) from attack?² How can we suppress extremists, especially radical Islamists, in order to reduce (to nothing, if possible) their destructive capacity? How can we fight against terrorist networks both within national borders and internationally? And, since these networks are often transnational, how can we establish connections and cooperate with other countries to put an end to their activities in several places at once? And how can we identify these networks and their leaders so as to be able to neutralize them?

What processes lead individuals to join extremist groups? How can we fight against the appeal of radical ideologies (jihadist Islam in the first place but also violent far-right and far-left views) in societies and, in particular, how do we fight homegrown terrorism, centered not in a foreign country (the Middle East) but in Europe or, less commonly, in the United States, Australia, or Canada?

Another series of questions concerns the profile of those who embark on the path of radicalization: What are the typical profiles of people who become involved in terrorism in its new forms? How do groups constitute themselves, join together, and set in motion a violent action? How do they recruit their members? Who are their sympathizers? And by what criteria do these sympathizers embrace their radical vision, to the point of becoming directly involved in attacks? In short, how do passive sympathizers turn into active terrorists? Finally, how do we deradicalize those who have yielded to the attraction of extremists? In Great Britain, the United States, Norway, and Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and others), procedures for deradicalization have been devised that combine group therapy, indoctrination sessions by competent authorities (imams for the radical Islamists), and follow-ups by the police and psychologists to direct the former radicals toward nonviolent behaviors.

Governments have called on the academic world, especially in the United States—but also, to a lesser degree, in Europe and in the often authoritarian regimes of the Middle East and elsewhere—to establish profiles of those with a potential for violent action based on a radical ideology, primarily jihadist Islam. Billions of dollars have been invested, either directly (by the U.S. intelligence services, especially Homeland Security, but also autonomously by cities, such as New York) or indirectly (through research grants), to remedy the lack of information on the subject. Radicalization, once a marginal theme, has become a major one, promoted by the Western nations and, at their impetus, by Muslim states or those affected by them (Singapore, Russia, China, and others), to gather the information necessary to thwart the mass violence perpetrated by small groups.

We have come to speak of a new form of low-intensity war, whose proliferation after the demise of the bipolar world (divided between two major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union), symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, marked a major shift in the configuration of conflicts. That type of war, waged by guerrillas and by terrorist groups operating in cities who detonate explosive charges in suicide attacks, cannot be combated effectively by traditional armies without profound modifications in their way of doing battle and collecting information.

Since the 1990s, the West has witnessed the appearance of homegrown terrorists, radical Islamists born and raised in Europe or the United States. For example, Khaled Kelkal, who was brought up in France, perpetrated the attack on the RER B rapid transit line at Saint-Michel station in Paris on July 25, 1995, killing 8 and injuring 148. But members of networks from other countries can also find opportunities to spend time in the West, as the members of al-Qaeda who attacked the Twin Towers in New York had done in Germany. For the intelligence services, the task of identifying each of these two types of terrorists raises different problems.

The need for information about these terrorists, homegrown or not, about how and why they embrace ideologies advocating violence, and about the forms of action they take, has in great part made radicalization a key notion for understanding the stages in the formation of terrorists.

A TINY MINORITY

In Western and even Islamic societies, the phenomenon of radicalization affects only a minority, and a tiny one at that. Many may embrace a radical ideology, and many can spiral into violence for economic or social reasons (delinquency, crimes of passion), but few combine the two dimensions and make violence a means of self-expression. Governments do so when they adhere to a supremacist ideology (the superiority of one race or social group over others) or set themselves up as representatives of a privileged class (the working class, in the case of the Soviet Union under Stalin) or of a nation (Hitler’s Germany, for example, where National Socialism led to radical nationalism). As I define it, however, the term radicalization does not encompass the state. It includes only movements from below, instigated by individuals or groups advocating an extremist ideology and resorting to violent action. The notion of radicalization has elective affinities with that of terrorism but is distinguished from it in that the focus is on the terrorists’ motivations—on the types of organizations that shape their thinking and which they shape in turn.

Only a very small minority of people become radicalized, both in the West (I am thinking of jihadists but also of those on the violent far right, such as the Norwegian Anders Breivik) and in other parts of the world. In the Muslim world, jihadist movements may enjoy the sympathy of a greater or lesser number of people, but jihadists in the strict sense of the term are very few in number, even in Pakistan.

In the West, the number of murders and assassinations imputable to jihadism, associated with an extremist version of Islam, or to terrorism in general, including those by the far right or far left, is quite limited if one considers the period after July 2005. The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 2,973 and wounded 6,291, not counting the 19 hijackers who flew the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The attacks by jihadists on March 11, 2004, in the suburban trains of Madrid killed 191 and injured 1,858. Those of July 7, 2005, in the London Underground and in a bus, killed 52, in addition to the 4 suicide bombers, and injured some 700. Since that time (before November 2014), only Anders Breivik’s attack on July 22, 2011 (77 dead, 151 wounded) killed more than 50 victims in a Western nation.

Europol statistics for France and Europe for the years 2011 and 2012 show that jihadist terrorism has been insignificant there in recent years, in terms of the number of attacks and of persons arrested, though the figures vary a great deal from one year to the next, as does the number of people killed.

Nevertheless, public anxiety is directed primarily toward radical Islamists. Corsican and Basque separatism (less and less) and far-right terrorism (the Breivik case or the far right in Greece, Germany, and even France) do not raise as many fears as radical Islamism. There is obviously an anxiety linked to jihadism, which translates into excessive media coverage, itself linked to the intensity of the fear experienced by the public. Jihadist radicalization is not placed on the same footing as regional separatism or political extremism in Europe, because the danger it represents is not perceived in the same way: separatism is considered internal to society, whereas radical Islamism is experienced as external, Islam still being, for the vast majority, a non-European religion. From that standpoint, domestic Islamist terrorists are even more worrying: they embody not only a threat but a betrayal of European identity. The disproportion between the real danger and the perceived danger can also be attributed to the development of jihadism in the Muslim world, the misdeeds committed there (carnage, a high number of victims) being transposed to the domestic scene. It could just as easily be argued that jihadism has in great part been neutralized, precisely because of the increased vigilance of the intelligence services and law enforcement; the relatively low number of jihadist attacks in Europe may be due to the concentration of these agencies on that type of terrorism. In any event, the symbolic dimension of jihadist terrorism is fundamental. Mohamed Merah killed seven people, including three children, but the impact of these deaths is not measured by their number, and the feeling of insecurity that resulted was much higher than in the case of far-left or far-right terrorism in Europe. The inhuman character of Islamist radicalism also comes into play, as well as its motivations, which are difficult to fathom: the declaration of an intent to kill heretics contrasts sharply with the motivations of other terrorists, grounded in the world here below (class struggle for the far-left movements, war against an invading Islam for the far right, the desire to do battle with the federal government in the United States for ultraconservative activists).

Table 1. Terrorist Attacks in France and in Europe, 2011–2012

THE NOTION OF RADICALIZATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Radicalization cannot be approached solely as a national security concern, though that dimension prevails in the preoccupations of nation-states. Sociologists believe it necessary to raise the question of the forms of activism within a broader perspective and to analyze the under lying motivations of extremists by inquiring, in particular, into the long-term effects of stigmatization, humiliation, and insidious forms of rejection or exclusion of which disadvantaged populations are the object in society. That dimension is often minimized in repressive or intelligence strategies, but the sociologist’s role is precisely to displace the debate, which is at risk of focusing exclusively on law enforcement, and to emphasize the economic, political, and even socio-anthropological aspects of the phenomenon within an all-encompassing perspective. Radicalization must not be assessed solely within a national security context; it must become a problem entailing our understanding of society. The classic studies on terrorism raise that concern only implicitly, without focusing on it, whereas radicalization, which is attracting increased interest, designates institutional, organizational causes and also subjective forms linked to them much more explicitly than in the past. In particular, the new forms of symbolic acculturation through the Internet and mechanisms within closed groups are beginning to be understood, as is the withdrawal of individuals who self-radicalize, severing their ties with normal people, concealing their new allegiances from family and friends, and establishing connections through social media (Facebook, Twitter, and so on) with people they know only via the Web. Finally, the emphasis on radicalization highlights the modalities by which people turn to violence, based on the absorption of an ideology and on decisions that may entail ambivalence and uncertainty, as when individuals subscribe to the prevailing logic of a group for fear of finding themselves once again alone and without support. Others, on the contrary, may act in a deliberate effort to cross swords with society, based on forms of subjectivization that bind them to a destiny but whose modalities were not sufficiently taken into account in classic sociological studies dealing with extremism.

The process of radicalization occurs between the short and the medium term, even extending into the long term. One does not become radicalized within a few days. The process is longer, involving maturation over a period of months: changes, at first imperceptible, in modes of reasoning, affectivity, and sociability with those close to the individual, who sometimes sense the enigmatic transformation without managing to understand it. The short-term effect, after an individual maturation process, or in some cases a collective one (several individuals together), may be a violent act: a hostage taking or